Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  These were things that only one who had known her as long and as well as Miguel Rinehart could know.

  And there was one thing he felt sure he could count on. Nothing, neither success nor failure, could ever change Nora into anything intrinsically phony. She simply wasn’t that sort of person. She had her own ethics. They might be the ethics of the jungle, but they suited her.

  At the bar again J. C. watched him polish off his martini. “You’ll take care of the apartment for me? The rent is paid until the end of next week. If there’s anything left behind, send it along care of the Magnussen Agency. They’ll know how to find me,” Miguel said.

  Jean Claude shrugged. “How should they not? They will have only to read the papers and learn the whereabouts of a certain cinema star and her entourage.”

  “There’s a beauty at the perfume counter. Maybe she’ll take your mind off my sudden prostitution,” Miguel said.

  “Ah, mon Michel,” the agent said sadly. “It is your answer to everything.

  “What might that be?”

  “The woman. The mothering breast. The tender lip and gentle hand. I must say this. Forgive me and do not become angry with me. Each time to run from here to there, a woman is waiting. If there is none, you find one. This is tragedy. Women are for the body, not for the mind. When you learn this, you will have learned the secret of success.”

  “I’ll forgive you the inaccuracy of your statement,” Miguel said mirthlessly, “but not the romantic notion you have of how I spend my time.”

  J. C. sighed heavily and said, “You will not return to France, mon Michel. I have the feeling.”

  “I’ll be back,” he said, wishing the Frenchman would contain his sentimentality. In some ways, Jean reminded Miguel of his father. Raoul, with a few drinks in him, had always been a marshmallow of concern for his fellow man, but a pirate when the chips were on the table.

  The speaker system announced the flight and Miguel was glad. It was always unpleasant to run out of conversation once your good-bys were said.

  “That’s it,” Miguel said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “I am sorry about the tourist flight, ami. I had no time to do better.”

  “I couldn’t afford better anyway,” Miguel said, picking up his brief case.

  “Afford,” Jean said scornfully. “Artfilm will pay.”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  Jean took off his glasses and stood up. “You will write?”

  “Yes.” A conventional lie. He would not write, nor did J. C. expect it. But if they chanced to meet again, they would pick up their friendship where they had dropped it. It was one of the advantages of so casual a relationship. You never got hurt and you could afford to be tolerant. Even charitable.

  “Please give my best to Karl Olinder when you see him. Tell him I did my very best to dissuade you from this idiocy of going to Hollywood.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Miguel said.

  “Magnussen will be pleased, naturellement.”

  “I imagine he will.”

  “I was not meant to be an agent, perhaps,” J. C. said. “I do not think like your Magnussen.” He paused and then said gingerly, “You will see Alaine?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not right away.”

  “I am a busybee.”

  “Busybody.”

  “Bee, body. What does it matter? My heart is heavy. Such a waste, such a pity.”

  Miguel found himself growing weary of Jean’s lamentations. He took his boarding pass from his wallet and said again, “Well, thanks for everything. No need for you to get wet. Stay here and have one last Pernod to the memory of an ex-expatriate.”

  Jean Claude, his eyes moist, kissed Miguel on both cheeks and said, “I shall miss you, mon Michel. Try very hard to return.”

  “La belle France,” Miguel said.

  “Adieu, mon ami.”

  “Hasta la vista, prieto,” Miguel said. He touched his arm and left him at the bar and walked downstairs and through the arcade toward the south concourse to join the straggling line of tourists, servicemen, honeymooners and salesmen filing through the gate into the drizzling rain.

  The Constellation was crowded with a group from Frankfurt. They had monopolized all the window seats and were shouting to one another in German. The stewardess, a French girl, was staring morosely at the excited Teutons. Remembering the pictures of Dachau, Miguel wondered? Or perhaps an elder brother taken into forced labor a decade ago? Times change, ma’mselle, Miguel thought.

  He found himself a seat next to a Belgian Air Force officer and settled down.

  A plump blond burgher in the seat ahead lit a cigarette. The Belgian leaned forward and tapped his shoulder sternly, calling attention to the Défense de Fumer sign alight over the door to the cockpit. The German studied the officer’s blue uniform for several seconds and then a smile spread over his porcine features and he nodded affably and crushed the cigarette in the ash tray.

  “Les Boches,” the Belgian said under his breath. He turned to regard Miguel with a steady, almost disconcerting intensity. “You are American, are you not?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I surmised as much. I heard you speaking to the girl at the perfume counter. I knew you were not English.” He extended his hand. “Pierre Artigue.”

  Miguel took the hand and said, “Miguel Rinehart, Lieutenant.”

  The officer looked pleased. “You know the ranks. Even after fifteen years of being overrun by uniforms, so few people know the ranks.”

  “I was a pilot in the American Army,” Miguel said.

  “You were in Europe?”

  “No.”

  “The Pacific?”

  “No,” Miguel said again. As always, when this conversation took shape, he felt a deep resentment of his father’s interference and influence that had kept him safe from harm, secure as Kirbee’s aide-de-camp, while other men fought the war. Perhaps it was foolish and quixotic, but when he had left home for Flying School that spring of 1942, he had been seeking a trial by fire and Raoul had reached unasked into the upper echelons and taken it from him. And then later, because of Alaine, he had lacked the spirit to take the transfer Colonel Holman had offered him into an alerted squadron. By that time it had been too late, really. He had been bought. Maybe it was Raoul’s way of paying him back, but he doubted it. The truly hurtful thing about it all was that even then, everything Raoul did for him was because, in his way, he loved him. Absalom, oh, my son—

  I could have been kinder, Miguel thought. But how, good God, how? And what good would it have done to feign kindness? When love and respect turned to hate, what sort of miracle was needed to turn it back to love again?

  Yet how the ripples spread. If Raoul had not influenced General Kirbee, Miguel and Tom would never have started out across the mountains together that morning. Nora would probably still be Tom’s wife. And I wouldn’t be sitting here now, Miguel thought, sitting on a French airfield ready to fly the Atlantic to go to work for a man named Ziegler in a lotusland called Hollywood.

  The young Belgian’s voice asked, “You had an accident, perhaps?”

  “Yes.” Yes, you could call it an accident. If you didn’t know better.

  “You would rather not speak of it,” the Belgian said darkly. “Not while we are in the hands of French pilots.”

  Miguel tilted the seat back and tightened the safety belt across his lap. A rumble spread through the airplane as one engine started, then another. The beam of the landing lights cut a slice out of the rainy darkness.

  “It seems to me,” the lieutenant said thoughtfully, “that I know your name from somewhere. Were you ever a resident of Liege?”

  “No.”

  “I have an excellent memory for names ordinarily. Are you related to the Rheinhardt family of Brussels? They make shoes.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I have no relatives in Europe.” For a moment Miguel considered cutting short this inevitable search for a common ground with th
e information that he was an author and that perhaps the lieutenant had heard of him in that manner, but then he realized such a statement would lead to the equally inevitable and far more trying litany that began with, “Oh? And what do you write?” He was too tired and too preoccupied with his own thoughts to run through the entire rigmarole, so he merely said, “I have been in Europe for nearly a year. We may have met somewhere.”

  The lieutenant nodded agreement, his memory for names vindicated. He was silent as the airliner began to move. Then he asked, “You are still an aviator?”

  “Only occasionally.”

  “Ah. A pity.”

  “Yes.”

  An aviator, Miguel thought. We never called ourselves that. Pilot. Airplane driver. Wartime talk. He closed his eyes. He hoped Lieutenant Artigue would not want to make conversation all the way to Shannon. There were people who couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to charm every passing stranger with their friendliness. Or whatever.

  Nora was like that, and it came across in her pictures. It was one of the secrets of her phenomenal success. Only Miguel knew it was a cultivated thing. “Part of my art, darling,” she said. She had worked very hard to develop it.

  The airplane taxied through the rain, ponderous, slowly pitching as it rolled over the undulations in the concrete taxiway.

  Alaine, Nora, Allie. Like a three-headed guardian of the gates of my life, Miguel thought. Brutal simile. But apt. First there had been Allie Wylie, the tender image of the past. Then suddenly Nora and Alaine. Thinking of it now, he was plagued by the duality of fate. To have met both Nora and Alaine on the same night, in the same place, was somehow symbolic and just. The twenty-third of February, 1943.

  He was sitting alone, holding a table for four in the Lower Mark, listening to the piano player toying with a song called “You Are Always in My Heart,” and waiting for Tom Eubanks and Billy Alberg to show up with their dates.

  The bar was crowded with men in uniform and their women. In the corner near the piano, a young Marine lieutenant held his girls hand in that peculiarly desperate grip of imminent parting. At the end of the bar, a girl in a cheap tight dress that would have been out of place in the Mark Hopkins in a world at peace, held a group of naval officers at bay with a red smile. A major of paratroops with ribbons on his blouse hunched over his highball and surveyed the room with moody hostility. A trio of flying cadets huddled around a tiny table laden with empty glasses watching a second lieutenant fresh from Flying School describe with his hands the maneuvers of his final check. And through it all, a sprinkling of civilians, prosperous, self-conscious and conspicuous in that sea of blue, green and olive drab. San Francisco, Miguel thought somberly, the rim of the happy land.

  The news from North Africa was bad. The Afrika Korps had struck at Kasserine Pass and casualties were said to be heavy. Miguel was thinking of fliers he knew who were there. People he had met at Luke and Will Rogers Field. Thinking about it didn’t help. You could only hope they made it and forget it.

  He looked around, but there was no sign yet of either Billy or Tom. They had planned to meet here and then go on to a party Oliver and Ella Eubanks were giving in Oakland. But Miguel had decided suddenly that he didn’t want to go and wouldn’t be missed at one of Ollie’s parties. Now he was simply waiting to see Billy and congratulate him on his new commission and maybe have a drink with Tom and then catch the Clipper out to Hamilton Field for dinner at the Officers’ Club. For lack of anything better to do, he could go down onto the flight line and help Sergeant Lippo and the line crew pull the engine of the general’s B-25. That was one thing about being Kirbee’s flying aide. You got to tinker with all kinds of airplanes.

  He finished his drink slowly and ordered another. He glanced at his wrist watch. Six-ten. Then he looked up and saw her.

  She was standing near the screen separating the bar from the wide passageway into the lobby so that the light from outside fell full on her face.

  The images came all at once, in a tumbled montage. She was tall, with sunburned blond hair. Aldyth Wylie would look like that now. For one frightening instant he actually thought that it was Allie. But this girl was too tall and there were other subtler differences. And she was with Billy Alberg.

  Miguel stood up. “This is Alaine Winters, Spick,” Billy said. “Allie, Mike.” Then, laughing a little uncertainly, he added, “Whoa there, boy. Come out of it.” And Miguel realized he was staring because the shattering coincidence of the name had caught him completely unprepared.

  “Lieutenant,” Billy Alberg said lightly. “This is Navy territory. Withdraw your troops.”

  Miguel realized he was holding Alaine’s hand. He smiled self-consciously and said, “Is that true, Miss Winters? Ensign Alberg in command here?” He tried to make the question impersonal, a bit of banter, but he felt he failed miserably. It was as though there were a steel band around his chest as he looked at her. And she regarded him curiously with solemn gray eyes and seemed to know what he meant. “I haven’t decided yet, Mike,” she said.

  They sat down, Miguel across the table from her so that he could look at her, and Billy protectively close.

  “Where’s Uncle Tom?” Billy asked.

  “He’s been on leave. But he’ll meet us here,” Miguel said.

  Billy craned his neck around, looking for a waiter.

  “What do you do, Mike?” Allie asked. “I know you’re a pilot. But what else do you do?”

  “Does everyone have to do something?”

  “Almost everyone does.”

  “Then I’m the exception, I guess.”

  “Mike the modest,” gibed Billy.

  “Didn’t I read a story of yours in The Atlantic?” Alaine asked. Miguel studied the play of light over the smooth, strong planes of her face. She accepted his scrutiny without awkwardness.

  “I don’t know. Did you read it?” He was being suddenly flip and defensive and he didn’t want to be. He shook his head and said more sincerely, “I’m not going to ask you what you thought of it. I haven’t got that kind of courage.”

  “I’ll tell you one day. When we’re friends,” she said.

  He could feel his heart thudding and he was certain he was on the brink of making a bloody ass of himself. But she had said “when we’re friends.” That was a beginning. He glanced down at her hands. They were large and strong with lightly tinted fingernails. She smiled at him and held them up.

  “No,” she said. “No ring.”

  “I would have asked, you know,” Miguel said.

  “What goes on here?” Billy Alberg asked broadly. “I don’t want to interrupt or anything like that, but the waiter would like to know what you want to drink.”

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” Alaine said. But she didn’t sound sorry, Miguel thought triumphantly.

  “Allie baby, I don’t mind,” Billy said grinning. “But look out for this character. He’s left a string of ruined girls from Phoenix to San Francisco.”

  Miguel wanted to hit him, but he managed to smile and say, “There has to be some compensation for the curse of a Latin temperament.”

  Billy banged him on the arm and said, “Well, there, just watch it, flyboy. Remember, I can tell her things about you that would curl her hair.” He looked around the room and asked, “By the way, where is she?”

  “She?”

  “Well, your date?”

  “I wasn’t planning on going on to Ollie’s. I have to fly Kirbee to Mitchell Field tomorrow.”

  Billy’s round face, made so young by the dark uniform and the crew-cut hair, looked pained. “We re celebrating my stripe, Spick. You can’t duck out like this. Besides, who is going to get Uncle Tom back to the base after he gets a skinful? You know how he gets at his old man’s parties.”

  “Won’t you come?” Alaine asked. And Miguel knew that he would, knew that he had decided the minute she walked into the room.

  “It’s six-thirty,” Billy said. “What time is Tom going to show up, anyway?”

>   “Any time now. There’s no hurry,” Miguel said.

  “How about these characters, Allie,” Billy said. “Pretty soft, isn’t it? In the same outfit ever since Flying School. Damon and Pythias.”

  “You could have enlisted with us.”

  “Not this lad. I hate airplanes.” Billy’s expression changed slightly. “As a matter of fact, I’m not the only one. So does old Tom. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” Billy said, tapping the rim of his glass with a fingertip. “I’m telling you what Tom told me himself. That weekend he came down from Moses Lake to see the USC game at Berkeley. We tied one on together at the Deke house and he gave me to understand that he only went into the Air Corps because of you. Maybe because of Ollie, but mostly because of you.”

  “Tom says things he doesn’t mean when he’s loaded,” Miguel said. “Tom’s not afraid to fly.”

  Billy shrugged and turned to Alaine. “You hardly know Tom, Allie, but he’s a funny guy. I don’t think I’m out of line in saying the old uncle just isn’t very bright. You probably know the type. Always on crutches in high school because he’s a fullback or a tackle. Big man on campus. To everyone but the Spick, here. Tom thinks this character is God with four stars on his shoulders.” He looked over at Miguel and said, with a shade of resentment in his voice, “It’s true, isn’t it, Mike?”

  “Tom’s all right, Billy,” Miguel said quietly.

  “Sure he is. Why wouldn’t you say that? You own him, after all. Ever since we were kids. Ever since the river. What is the secret of your strange power over the bear who walks like a man?”

  “Knock it off, Billy,” Miguel said.

  Alaine watched the two men in silence.

  Billy shook his head ruefully and retreated a little. “Mind over matter,” he said. “Svengali and Trilby.”

  A Marine pilot, very drunk, stood sadly for a moment swaying over their table. “Terrible situation, terrible,” he said, regarding them mournfully. “Even rationing women now. Awful.” He walked away through the crowd, shaking his head.